Gender and Feminisms презентация

Session overview
MDGS ----- SDGs
Gender statistics
Gender and development?
What is gender?
What about feminism?
Implications for knowledge
Society
Education
Development

Development – Education - Gender
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

MDG Progress by 2015 (i)
UNESCO (2015) EFA GMR, UNESCO, Paris
Discriminatory institutions undermine gender equality
Gender bias remains in textbooks
Gender stereo-typing negatively affects girls performance especially in maths
Once enrolled girls stand an equal or better chance of continuing to upper primary
New schools and available sanitation improve girls’ access
Gender disparities increase in secondary school and higher levels

MDG Progress by 2015 (ii)
UNESCO (2015) EFA GMR, UNESCO, Paris
More female teachers increase parental demand for girls’ education
There are increased numbers of female teachers but this drops at higher levels
Little gender training in teacher ed. Courses
In some cases boys drop out more with a gender disparity against boys
Boys encounter physical violence and girls experience sexual harassment and sexual abuse in schools
Teachers often have impunity in such violence cases

Progress by 2015 (iii)
UNESCO (2015) EFA GMR, UNESCO, Paris
69% of countries will achieve gender parity in primary education by 2015
Poverty increases gender disparities
Early marriage and pregnancy negatively affect girls’ access to school
Girls and women are under-represented in all aspects of social /political / economic life

Sustainable Development Goals
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?menu=1300

Access to all levels
(pre-school to university)
Quality
Learning outcomes
Skills for work
Equality
Literacy and Numeracy
Sustainable livelihoods
Rights
Equality
Peace
Global citizenship
by 2030

End- Discrimination
Violence
FGM
Early Marriage
Value- unpaid care domestic work
Share responsibilities
Offer social protection
Enable - Participation
Leadership
Decision making
Sexual and reproductive health rights

Measuring development
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/table-1-human-development-index-and-its-components

Gender-related Development Index
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/table-5-gender-related-development-index-gdi
Ratio of female to male Human Development Index (HDI) value (see also definition of HDI).
Life expectancy at birth: Number of years a newborn infant could expect to live if prevailing patterns of age-specific mortality rates at the time of birth stay the same throughout the infant’s life.
Mean years of schooling: Average number of years of education received by people ages 25 and older, converted from educational attainment levels using official durations of each level.
Expected years of schooling: Number of years of schooling that a child of school entrance age can expect to receive if prevailing patterns of age-specific enrolment rates persist throughout the child’s life.
Estimated earned income Gross national income (GNI) per capita: Derived on the basis of the ratio of female to male wage, female and male shares of economically active population, and GNI (constant 2011 PPP$).

Gender Inequality Index
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/table-4-gender-inequality-index
Gender Inequality Index: A composite measure reflecting inequality in achievement between women and men in three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment and the labour market.
- Maternal mortality ratio: Number of deaths due to pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births.
Adolescent birth rate: Number of births to women ages 15–19 per 1,000.
Share of seats in national parliament: Proportion of seats held by women in a lower &/ or upper house/ senate as % of total seats.
Population with at least some secondary education: % population ages 25 + who have reached (even if not completed) a secondary schooling
Labour force participation rate: Proportion of a country’s working-age population (15+) in the labour market, working or looking for work, as a % of the working-age population.

Questions about gender in education for development (for seminar)
Why is there a special concern for gender?
How would you rationalise this?
Do the statistics help you justify this? Explain.
Does a WID or GAD approach to gender make a difference to how you might address gender?
Can you describe how gender is conceptualised in these approaches?
Does this matter?

Education, Development and Gender
Education is a vector for development
Education is an indicator of development
Education is justified in terms of its impact on:
Economic rates of return to education(social / individual)
Human capital theory and economic production (modernisation)
Literacy / numeracy
Empowerment and participation
Reduced fertility, child & maternal mortality & improved health
Educated women as better producers and consumers (neo-liberalism and markets)

The production of gender identities
Multiple and contingent
geographical and cultural
Social regulation & institutional regimes
In home, school & work
‘Othering’(what you are not)
including Learner / intellectual identities

Schools as Institutions
Networks of institutional processes and relations - power and position
Institutional regimes regulate boundaries and discipline
Rules and practices formal and informal life
Space, place and action symbolise power and position
Schools as identity sites production and performances

Gender regimes in schools
leadership & management
curriculum (texts /choice / specialism)
teacher and student duties and relations
physical & verbal space
physical and verbal violence
non-intervention in the ‘natural’ gender order.

Gender Theories
explicit & implicit
institutional & personal
Inclusive Education
&
Gender Equity
Policy
institutions & curriculum
teachers & students
Practice
social interactions
relations & outcomes

Deconstructing gender theories
Female
Male
From
Biology to social construction
categories to relations
natural to performative
outcomes to processes
macro to everyday

Gender Identities
Beyond biology and ascription
Being gendered is an embodied identity performance
A constant becoming
Relational and multiple rather than Female/Male polarity
Contextually contingent upon institutional regimes and regulation
More than the conflation of gender and (hetero-)sexualities

Gender and sexuality
- the heterosexual matrix

Regulating gender and sexuality
- the heterosexual matrix

Performing Heterosexual Identities

Hetero-normativity
Heterosexual femininities / masculinities assumed
Learned & accomplished within a gender regime
Regulated by institutional norms and other institutional actors
Identification, internalisation but some space for agency

Culture & Context
Gender and sexuality performances vary
from one context to another
over time
they are contextually & culturally contingent
Different social meanings
boys holding hands in school compound in
rural Malawi / North London School
Differently appropriated
male strength
Lifting carrying heavy objects (doors / pints of beer/ furniture)
Wood or water on their head

Gender /Sexuality regimes
Institutional practices structure & regulate gender and sexuality
processes
identities
power
relations
When gender / sexuality is naturalised in reference to original biological difference
Reproduction of stereotypes
A cultural dead-end
Denial of agency
Limit possibilities for intervention & change

…. and knowledge????
We have now considered gender in
development
education
society
And there are implications of this for :
research
knowledge
……

FEMINISM!!!!!
Rise of feminist critique due to the exclusion
- as subjects of research (Freud/ Piaget)
- in the production of knowledge
Highlighting
power and interests
voice and participation
different standpoints
links between the process and products of research
importance of reflexivity

Doing gender
Natural ----- Normal ------ Neutral
Social categories
The relationship between distributions and representations is both the product and the stake of a permanent struggle … the classifications … are expressed and legitimated, … perpetuating misrecognition, an alienated cognition that looks at the world through categories the world imposes, and apprehends the social world as a natural world.’ (Bourdieu, 1990:141)
Denial of subjectivity and affect.
The objectifier treats the object as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account. (Nussbaum, M. 1999: 218)

Undoing gender
Production of difference
…differences are never just “differences”. In knowing differences and particularities, we can better see the connections and commonalities because no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining.
(Chandra Mohanty , 2003 p.226)
The illusion of biological origins
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.
(Butler, 1990 p.25)

Heuristic Map

Feminist research
Feminism as
embodied knowledge
the personal as political
a site of action & knowledge production
involving the affective / emotions
starting to addressing pleasure, intimacy, links between sexualities & intimacies and to citizenship

But all feminists are not the same
(Hey, 2014)

Infectious modernity
. . . interests, concerns, predilections, neuroses, prejudices, social institutions and social categories of Euro/Americans have dominated the writing of human history. One effect of this Eurocentrism is the racialization of knowledge: Europe is represented as the source of knowledge and Europe as knowers. Indeed male gender privilege as an essential part of European ethos is enshrined in the culture of modernity. This global context for knowledge production must be taken into account in our quest to understand African realities and indeed the human condition (Oyĕwùmí, 2002: 1).

Feminisms beyond gender
To define feminism purely in gendered terms assumes that our consciousness of being ‘women’ has nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality, just with gender. But no one ‘becomes a woman’ (in Simone de Beauvoir’s sense) purely because they are female. Ideologies of womanhood have as much to do with class and race as they have to do with sex.
(Chandra Mohanty 1991: 12-13)

Feminism
Absences
Participation in doing research
as subject to/ of research
Voice & interests
Different human motivations for action
‘The simplifying core of economic theory is the assumption that all agents within society are essentially and universally motivated by the attempt to maximise their individual utilities and satisfaction, the ‘ends’ of economic endeavour.’ P.14
Kabeer, N (1996) Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London, Verso
Feminism stands
Against polarisation of debate
For the inclusion of
marginalised voices,
highlights relations, contingencies and complexities
non-rational / emotional aspects